Smite may have been the last game that my friends and I really played together.
It hit me, while watching the Smite World Championship this past weekend. I was watching the teams compete, and kept thinking how young all of the players looked. I always knew that esports are dominated by people in their early twenties, where they’re old enough to live on their own but still young enough to not worry about much else but playing games for 8+ hours a day. But this year, the players just looked far younger than usual.
I realized that it wasn’t that this year featured younger players…the players were roughly the same age group as normal. I was just older.
It’s been months since I last played Smite. I used to sink hours and hours into that game, every week. Out of 600+ games in my Steam library, Smite holds my highest playtime, by far, and that’s not even counting the hundreds of hours I put into the game before it debuted on Steam. But, things have changed. My close-knit group of friends, of whom I’ve been gaming with since high school (2006ish) all have our own, adult, lives now. Online gaming kept us in touch over the years, but time’s finally caught up. We are embedded into professional careers, working on high-level education, or busy raising kids.
Smite was the last game we all played regularly, before life caught up with us. We discovered it, when the game was still in beta, in early 2013. I still remember my first game: Domination, and I played as Loki, back when he was clad in a hideous orange-red getup. As the years progressed, Smite grew and grew. It was really something spectacular to see. In all of my years of gaming, I had never been a part of something quite like Smite.
I’d look forward to patch note livestreams as much as I’d look forward to episodes of Game of Thrones. The community was growing, and Hi-Rez had an awesome team that really understood the importance of maintaining a community. Hi-Rez even brought on-board some of the more popular Smite players/streamers onto their management team, really giving the company a sense that they valued players are more than just customers. The developers and streamers chatted with people on Twitter and Reddit, and I remember really feeling like I was part of this weird video game family.
Smite’s momentum kept snowballing and it eventually grew to what it is today. As did my friends and myself. We’re not the same people we were when we started Smite, much like Smite isn’t the same game that it was.
The game is massive now, with large player bases on three platforms and two spin-off games in the works. Most impressively, Smite saved Hi-Rez from going under, and was profitable enough that Hi-Rez could afford to make an entirely new franchise, Paladins, which seems to be doing quite well on its own.
This post is getting rambly so before it totally gets out of hand, I’ll wrap it up.
Over the past year, my friends and I have come together around certain games. We played Overwatch regularly for about a month, then that faded out; the hype around WoW: Legion came and went; Star Wars Battlefront held our interests for a few months; and most recently Battlefield One (our second most favored game was Battlefield 3, mind you), kept us busy for a weekend. That’s it. One weekend. That was all the time we could squeeze out of our busy lives.
So, it was while I was watching these 21-23 years olds at the Smite World Championship when I realized I was watching and seeing myself in those players. They were having the time of their lives, playing Smite, and little did I know, that back when I was heavily into Smite, I was having the time of my life with my friends, for possibly the last time.
In the words of Andy Bernard from The Office: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
VVGB Smite, VVT for the memories.
